Steve and Eddie hang out at the pool when they get flashes of themselves in other worlds including; a world where they are essentially Bond & Q, a happier version of Hawkins but Eddie is also a girl, a sitcom world where Eddie & Steve are Dustin's two dads, also
eggplants.
⚠ Brief gender bending, no dysphoria.
Steve tugged at his rolled-up pant leg. The edges of it were already wet from the pool, but there was some distant thought that fixing the pant leg would prevent them from getting more wet. Which, did anyone actually care? No one did. Maybe it was just a lizard brain reaction brought on by all the times his mother told him to knock that off.
The pool was empty at the moment, which meant no risk of getting splashed by some six-year-old who decided to cannonball at short range. That meant it was safe to stake out a piece of the pool’s edge and enjoy the profound peace of chilling poolside. It would have been even better if only there was a sun overhead, but for now the conditions were acceptable. It wasn’t like working on a tan meant anything after a reset every seven days, anyway.
“I just mean… why’s it called Dungeons and Dragons? That’s misleading. It should be Dice and… and…” Quick thinking wasn’t always a Harrington genetic trait. “I don’t know. If you advertise dragons, then I’m always going to be disappointed if there aren’t any.” It was a continuing conversation with Eddie, mostly because Steve realized that Eddie could talk at length about it and Steve could always keep challenging the topic for the fun of it. Or maybe to learn a thing or two. Reluctantly, but maybe.
“What, like real dragons?” Eddie said. He had a wide, goofy smile on his face which expressed amusement in a completely unguarded way. It was hard to think of Steve by the old labels: rich, popular, jock. He was just Steve now. Eddie didn’t recognize the person he thought he was.
“Dragons are in the game. They’re one of the monsters you can face. And dungeons? I guess it’s kind of like… in sports you play on a field? In D&D you play in a dungeon. It’s where the bad guys like to guard their treasure with monsters and shit.”
Eddie didn’t know if the metaphor worked, it was just the closet he could come up with. Sometimes, trying to explain the game to Steve was like explaining something to an alien. Eddie knew just enough about Steve’s culture to translate.
“You want to smoke?” Eddie asked. He was pretty sure weed would only improve this conversation.
“Like -- no, man. If I decide I’m going to play Dungeons and Dragons, I expect that there are going to be non-metaphorical dragons.” It was some nuance that was clearly missed by Steve, who had randomly decided to be annoyed at one trivial part of a bigger thing. “Every time. Dragons. You know Snakes and Ladders, right? Every game there’s snakes and there’s ladders.”
He swung his submerged legs around in the water. They cut small wakes in the pool water that sloshed against the sides.
“And I don’t think smoking would help that make any more sense, but yeah. If you’re offering, I’m not saying no.” He paused, then added. “Unless it means I have to get up right now. Then I’m saying maybe.”
Eddie smirked. He had joints already rolled up in the front right pocket of his leather jacket, which he produced for the both of them. The temperature at Derleth was perfectly comfortable that Eddie could have gone with or without, but the jacket felt like armor to him. He slipped it off his shoulders just then. Just the two of them. It was fine.
“It’s not a board game. You don’t sit down for an hour with your mom and talk about your day and see who wins. That’s not how it works.”
He had to fish around in the pocket of his jeans for the lighter. Eddie still had his shoes on and though he was near the ledge of the pool, he did not have his feet in it. He was fine around the water, really, and yet…
Even being able to see the bottom of the pool didn’t completely ease his concern that something in the water wouldn’t drag someone through another gate to the upside down.
At Eddie’s instant gratification approach, Steve had to give him a nod of approval. Maybe if it wasn’t for it being close to graduation when he’d found out that being a popular asshole wasn’t a great lifestyle, then he might’ve realized that Eddie Munson was a solid guy all along. And with that would have come ease of access to this stuff.
It was a more cheery thing to reflect on than finding out Eddie was made of some decent stuff, which maybe only had a chance to continue if he never went home.
“Who sits down with their mom for an hour?” Was the retort. If there was ever a group where that didn’t apply, it had to be the latchkey kid and the kid who lived with his uncle.
Eddie shrugged. He kind of assumed Steve did, even without saying anything his face said as much. At least when it came to family dinners and whatever else other kids from unbroken homes did.
But when he raised his hand to pass along the joint, it became an ordinary cigarette. They were no longer sitting, but standing. No longer in an old gym with a renovated pool, but a specialized garage filled with vehicles and fancy gadgetry. Completely top secret.
Agent Munson’s hair was short. He was clean shaven, which was not always a given depending upon the assignment. But he smelled of expensive product, his suit was impeccably sharp and tailored perfectly. Ed put the cigarette in his mouth and lit it with an expensive zippo, perfectly on the first attempt.
He offered a cigarette to H. Smoking wasn’t even allowed in the building, but Munson could be a cheeky bastard.
“What do you have to show me this time?”
H, whose world was generally limited to the walls of his research and development laboratory, beamed at the question. It was a highlight of every time Agent Munson came around. Being asked to show off the ‘cool shite’ that had been freshly-minted was a self-indulgence. To Munson’s calm and effortless cool was H’s whirlwind enthusiasm. He nipped the cigarette being offered with pincher fingers and produced his own lighter.
He flipped the cap back, took a generous step away…
Paused, then placed the cigarette into a set of lab tongs which were unceremoniously wedged into a Christmas mug that remained out and in use to spite everyone who insisted that the winter season had come and gone.
“Firepower,” he told Agent Munson.
H took a step back again and flicked the wheel. An eight-foot flame blasted out. It lit the cigarette. It also lit the entire cigarette and scorched part of the mug.
“The aim isn’t the ticket here. Clearly. One charge and done, but that should buy you time to plan a next move. Just…” H pressed his glasses upward and smiled at Munson. “Mind which lighter you pick when you decide to have a smoke, yeah?”
“You could have just told me you quit,” Munson stated. He was clearly pleased, even if he retained an air of mystery. It was part of the world class spy routine. He didn’t know exactly how to turn it off, just where to direct it.
In the field, Munson was an irredeemable flirt, had perfected the art of holding intense gazes, and was no stranger to having a stranger in bed.
Here, however, was the closest Munson could allow himself to be… Eddie. He patted H on the shoulder a few times before accepting the lighter with just the slightest hint of a smile.
“I promise to make it count,” he said. One was enough. The tiny device packed a powerful punch. “Anything else?”
H looked over the cigarette still pinched in the tongs. The last piece of it fell away to ash.
“Oh, you know me. I quit for the week. Ask me again in five days if it stuck.” He meandered to his work stool and kicked it off the spot to his work desk. There was a wave for Munson to follow.
And as Steve waved across the distance to Eddie as he was still sitting back from the pool, he looked at his hand and realized it was still holding the roll of weed. He brought his arm back in and cast a bemused look at Eddie.
“What was I saying…?” A hand raised to his face and felt around his cheeks. No glasses. Did he just have some random daydream?
Munson was quiet for a moment. No dry wit. Mildly concerned for his hair, he reached up to find there was still a length that reached his shoulders and let out a small relieved sigh.
“You were a nerd…”
It was the first thing that came to Eddie’s mind. He hadn’t seen his clothes, his build, or gotten a very good sense of much about him other than what it felt like to be Agent Munson. But Steve? Steve he had gotten a good view of.
“...Like a really, really, really smart nerd.”
Eddie looked back at his joint, but it had not even been touched. He squinted at it just to make sure. How could he possibly believe that he was sober?
“You saw that, too?” Steve had his gaze fixed on Eddie, trying to negotiate the mental image of an Eddie with short hair, and who was all intentional edges and tailored lines -- an image that swung a full 180 degrees from the wild-haired man sitting here by the pool.
“You had short hair. And an accent. Was… was that a James Bond thing?” It was enough of a rogue thought that Steve forgot to ask for the lighter. He was stuck on the notion that in a world where they were both possibly working for the Secret Service, he didn’t even rate as an agent. Just a nerd in a lab.
It was so impossibly un-Harrington-like that he didn’t even know how to process it.
“Why was I the nerd?”
Eddie was unusually quiet as he tried to process the brief flash that just happened. His lips pressed together, a little duck like, which was completely unlike the put together agent figure he’d been moments before.
“I mean… are we sure it was us?”
That was a fair question, wasn’t it? They were so unlike themselves. Eddie, for all his bluster, was still in danger of not graduating high school at all.
“We were British, dude. We’re totally not British,” Eddie said, his face cracking into a smile. British! How hilarious! This had to be something else. Right?
“We’re not British,” Steve agreed. It was a good, logical baseline. He leaned back, propping an elbow up on the concrete around the pool to support himself and reached out a finger to prod Eddie in the shoulder. Solid. He didn’t know why it would change anything if he found out otherwise, but that was a fork in the road and a path he didn’t need to walk down.
As he pushed himself back up to sitting, Steve felt the warmth of a campfire against his face in that almost too close and too hot prickle that was a mainstay of summer breaks spent fireside. They’d snuck out into the woods, set up a clearing and waited for the late sun to finally duck below the limits of the trees. A bag of marshmallows, chocolate, and graham crackers at his side wasn’t really his choice, but he’d leaned into it because it was an excuse for everything else. Like getting someone to agree to trek out into the woods after sundown.
His marshmallow had fallen off the end of his stick into the fire, and that meant digging into the bag for a fresh one. “Don’t judge me,” he told Eddie with a laugh. “I said I’ve been camping before. Didn’t say I had the art of s’mores down.”
At first, Eddie was pretty certain this was some kind of joke. Steve Harrington? A good guy? Rich parents, popular, had plenty of girls to pick from, not a douche? Pretty much went against her personal Munson Doctrine.
Okay, so the Scoops Ahoy uniform was weirdly hotcute kinda lame. The fact that he wasn’t living it up in college somewhere, while Eddie was still struggling with attempt number two and a half to graduate high school kind of endeared her to the idea of a date. Let her defenses down just enough to say yes.
She laughed, good naturedly, watching the marshmallow plop into the fire.
“I’ve… never actually been camping before…” she admitted. Eddie brushed long, unruly hair from her face.
The failure in Steve’s story was that it wasn’t camping as much as it was crashing with a friend in his family’s RV. There wasn’t any roughing it, but there was a day of realizing that fishing wasn’t really his thing. He was not qualified to talk up camping at all, but she didn’t need to know that.
“Oh, it’s you know… just nature but instead of leaving it after it gets dark, you stay in it.” Wow, Harrington, reach for that deep wisdom. He could almost hear Dustin’s smart alec remarks. Honestly, if Dustin hadn’t hyped up Eddie to him in the first place, he might have not decided to say screw it and talk to Hawkins’ outcast. It felt a little Breakfast Club, but that didn’t have to be a bad thing.
“So what’s this stuff Henderson says you play after school?” It was a question Steve would have never willingly asked, but you had to take an interest. He was going to try.
“Oh, is that it?” Eddie said, smiling. She hadn’t exactly asked to go out camping. Thankfully her uncle worked nights which gave her a certain amount of freedom. Eddie didn’t even have to come up with a lie regarding where she was.
Because outside Hellfire Club and Corroded Coffin? She didn’t really have friends. Certainly not any female friends. Guys were easier, weirdly. Less likely to judge her for her clothing or musical choices. But it also meant she couldn’t exactly pretend to be staying over at Brenda’s house or whoever-the-fuck.
This was probably stupid. But Steve hadn’t made a move and didn’t seem interested in pressuring her, which only encouraged her to scoot a little closer next to him, in order to get comfortable, clearly. In practice, it was more like a dare.
“D&D? Dustin told me he tried to invite you once when Lucas couldn’t make it. And you didn’t take him up on it?” Eddie enjoyed teasing him. “When he told me he asked you-- No way. Like no way was Steve Harrington nice to my little sheepies. Nu uh. I protect my boys from the popular kids. But you— you must have done something because the kid worships you…”
Eddie locked eye contact. Dustin’s praise had annoyed her at the time. That Steve was cute, somehow made it worse, too. But now? Eddie wanted to hear the story behind their bond.
Then Eddie blinked and put his hands to the ground next to him, as if to double check the space between them. He didn’t say anything at first. He didn’t have to. His expression sort of spoke for him: holy shit.
Now, the physical attraction didn’t bother him. He more or less felt the same in either reality. (He could recognize Steve was cute without feeling the need or deep desire to act on it.) It was realizing Steve, in some distant imagined scenario maybe, could maybe like him back? Eddie “The Freak” Munson? In that way? Nah.
“Huh…” was the most intelligent thing Eddie could think to say.
Steve was a little less mellow about it. It wasn’t necessarily the content, but the fact that twice now something had basically turned the channel without warning. He stood suddenly, causing a fair amount of splashing as his legs scrambled up the side of the pool and out, then had to find the right balance after half falling asleep.
“What is this?” He was probably shouting at nothing. He threw his arms wide and cast a flustered look at the ceiling. Why did everyone always assume that unseen forces and inexplicable phenomena were somehow the fault of something latitudinally higher? “Hey! A little warning?!”
His eyes ultimately wandered back down to Eddie, and Steve fell quiet. His annoyance had tapered enough to move onto the next pressing thing, which was trying to process that whatever just happened had inserted the thought that there was a context in which Eddie had been categorically placed into the ‘would date’ column.
Steve wasn’t equipped to say anything intelligent about that.
“Yeah, so…” His hands found his hips. He didn’t even remember he’d been holding a blunt in the moment, since it had tumbled from his hand in the midst of his pressing need to yell at the heavens. “So…”
Steve nodded. It was that key response men gave when they realized they were supposed to say something more, but the words were failing.
“Yeah.”
Eddie watched Steve stand, mildly jolted from his stupor, saw the joint fall to the ground, and then prioritized picking it up so that it didn’t get stepped on or wet. Once the weed was secure— maybe smoking in the midst of visions wasn’t a great idea after all— he could think about what was happening.
Mostly he felt a little more sane, watching Steve’s initial reaction. Eddie was unpredictable between when he tried to hold things in and when he let himself go off. His first concern was Steve. Steve who he assumed was like everyone else (minus Robin) and only into girls.
So Eddie gave him an out.
“Hey man, I would have asked me out, too. I was pretty cute.”
And then Eddie shrugged. Maybe they didn’t need to say any more than that. Eddie pocketed the joints for later. He didn’t make eye contact with Steve, just in case Steve needed a moment to semi-privately deal with what happened.
“Maybe these are like Robin’s vision? Only it’s like… not us. Like it feels like us, but it’s not actually us.”
On second thought maybe they did need to smoke up.
“You were pretty cute,” Steve admitted. Facts were facts. He wasn’t so hung up on the notion of asking out a pretty girl, even if the context of reality told him that pretty girl was Eddie Munson, for whom he’d never really framed in that way. That was a string he wasn’t about to pull on at the moment.
“Also, I don’t know, man. I felt like me.” He started to pace around the edge of the pool. It was a reactive pacing. It was pacing to think. “What if it’s like… how Vecna was getting at Nancy?”
And that stopped him on the spot. “That wouldn’t make sense, would it? His game is about destroying people. Not… not putting them in British accents.”
Eddie’s smile was goddamn triumphant. Maybe he was just pleased that Steve admitted to Eddie being cute. Maybe he just liked the sound of Steve saying he was cute. Or maybe Eddie knew Steve would be comfortable enough that Eddie now had permission to give him shit about it for years to come.
But his preening was interrupted when Steve brought up the V-word and his face fell.
“No…” Eddie said. That was more that he desperately wanted that not to be the case, not because he knew it wasn’t the case. “I mean, this was nothing like that. First of all, no clocks. Second of all…”
Eddie tried not to think of Chrissy. Her smile. How scared she was.
“We were basically happy in those memories,” Eddie said. Because he wanted to focus on that part. Not: they were terrified. Eddie hopped onto his feet, ready to go into manic mode, make loud declarations, if for no other reason than to distract. But once he hopped onto his feet…
INT. THE MUNSON-HARRINGTON LIVING RM - DAY
…Eddie’s hands clasp down on Steve’s shoulders. Our Dads have just realized that Dustin is not home, doing his homework upstairs in his room like he’s supposed to. They’ve been bamboozled!
EDDIE Steeeveee, it was your turn to go to check on the little butthead.
(Audience laugh track.)
Steve is seated in the big leather sofa beside the phone. He holds up a finger to Eddie… And like magic, the phone rings. Steve, smug, lifts the receiver.
STEVE Talk to me, Erica. Mmhmm? Yeah? Deal. No, just stall him and I’ll double the finder’s fee.
Steve claps a hand over one of Eddie’s on his shoulder.
STEVE (CONT’D) I outsourced it. Relax, I’ll go get him.
Steve pats Eddie’s hand one more time before jumping up to grab his keys. He stops and turns. His expression is apologetic in that sorry-but-I-had-to way.
STEVE (CONT’D) Also, semi-related, hope you weren’t planning on the pint of Rocky Road in the freezer.
(Audience laugh track.)
EDDIE You didn’t! -- Erica? She terrifies me! And she keeps raising her prices!
Eddie’s fear of Erica is hilarious because he’s supposed to be the tougher one of the two dads. Comedy! He watches Steve bravely reach for the car keys and approaches him, holding onto his arm as if Stevie is about to go off to war.
EDDIE (CONT’D) Steve. (Dramatic pause.) Be careful.
(Audience laugh track.)
Eddie looked down at his hands, which were not clinging to Steve in this reality. Eddie slowly widened his stance and held out his arms as if he could block out any more incoming memory flashes.
“Okay, new plan. We see if weed blocks this shit out.”
Eddie hurriedly reproduced the perfectly hand rolled joints, putting one in his mouth and patting himself down for the lighter. Fuck. Where was the lighter? Given how quickly the visions were coming, they needed to start fast.
“I’m game,” Steve replied, maybe a little too quickly, but given that Eddie was racing to get that underway, he didn’t feel bad about it. He caught that Eddie was fishing for a lighter and popped his own out of his jeans pocket.
And, then, carefully, he aimed it away from them both and gave it a test light. It didn’t blast a funnel of flame outward, so it was deemed safe enough for use.
“Feels like racing to get high ruins the whole flavor of the thing, though.” It was an observation delivered with an inkling of mourning in his tone, but needs must. He lit the lighter again and held it up for Eddie.
Eddie quickly leaned in and took a generous first inhale. Holding his breath, he held the smoke as long as he could before exhaling, “Desperate times, dude.”
There wasn’t anything wrong exactly with what they’d been shown. But Eddie was pretty sure that luck couldn’t last. Either the visions would put them in an unpleasant situation or… pit them against one another, which somehow seemed worse. Eddie couldn’t imagine a world where his luck remained.
He took another drag
and exhaled…
This was nice. No arms. No eyes. No mouth. Eddie felt himself just bob against the vine he was attached to. The sun was perfect, his thirst was quenched. He couldn’t see Steve precisely, but felt him close by.
Maybe the weed was a bad idea, Eddie thought-spoke. This time he was at least aware of his other selves. Maybe that was just the nature of being…
Am I tomato? he asked.
If Steve had a brow, it might have furrowed. He didn’t. And so he merely conceived of what a furrowed brow might feel like, which was stored somewhere in his recollection.
How could it be a bad idea? Steve mused. He felt a breeze against his skin and it swayed him to bump against a presence he was sure was Eddie. They both made a hollow sound.
I don’t think we’re tomatoes, dude. I think we’re -- was the most he could muster.
The pool came back into focus, and Steve heard his own voice say, “Eggplants.”
He stared ahead, eyes unfocused. Then, he took the joint from Eddie and took a deep inhale. There wasn’t much else to say or do to that last one.
“We don’t have to talk about it. Agreed?”
Eddie instantly missed the feeling of hanging. He kept his face neutral, even as he started to feel the effects of the weed. Eddie sat down near Steve’s feet and started to pull off his white reeboks, followed by socks with at least two holes between them, and started rolling up the cuff of his jeans just as Steve had done before dipping his feet in the pool.
“Yeah, that’s cool.”
But it was clear fighting the flashes of other worldly memories wasn’t going to help. So Eddie prepared himself to roll with it. Shrugging, Eddie reached up for the joint when Steve finished.